Tag: photography

This is a November Day

Yesterday, on the other hand, was, I don’t know, just beautiful, with the sun striking all the newly rained upon, glistening branches — upward turning, weeping, swinging, outreaching, barely swaying, curled, and grounded — such that they added crystal to the light and sent it soaring, and swooping, and tinkling, and landing on puddles, ponds, rivers, and, happily for me yesterday and my friend, the ocean.

we leapt so as not to step on the markings of shore, sea, and sky dwellers among who we were, you can see a rippling line of shells between our prints and the sea’s grasp. Each return of the water, touching, nudging, then backing from them.

The ocean rumbling in, sushing out, rolling in, sliding out, gliding up the sand slope, knocking about slipping back into its whorls clams in their clay white shells, and deserted, or gull raided clam shells, black and opalescent mussel shells, and, I believe, chambered nautiluses–some dwelt in, tossed by the sea to the sand, awaiting the rising tide’s reach to touch them, pull them in, sustain them, interfere with gull and biped mammal (including us) predation.

The gulls, those ever hungry, every talking, and keenly sighted denizens of seacoasts flew, flopped, flowed, flung prey. The tiny avians–pipers, plovers, their parties–darted away before we could glimpse them, but they left their mark!

And the sandcrabs, below, breathing shallowly in this swash zone, barely to be known of but by their little blow holes. Sssh.

The dunes we crossed through to reach the ocean, the dunes delightfully protected from the likes of us by access from road/parking to beach to be only a raised, bannistered wooden boardwalk–one can walk slightly above, one can look and revel, but, happily, one cannot trample–the dunes were every shade of green, yellow, red, brown, and every shape of leaf, petal, blade, frond, stem. And sitting distant among them, high on a dune, posed a snowy owl, from where we watched, merely spherical white head and languidly blinking eyes facing us and the prevailing winds, safe and solid. I took no picture, only stood in awe.

The ocean was the blue that could be purple, could be forest green, could be the color of a bluebonnet, could indigo, could be as a sapphire, could be, I don’t know, lapis lazuli. So many and it was all.

I will not show my friend, because I did not ask her permission, but here I stand, binoculars in hand.

Upon arriving on the sand, ahead of the wind at our back stroll at the edge of the sea’s reach. Also ahead of the wind pressing mightily into our faces on our return trek.

“In his hand are the deep places of the earth; the heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship…”Psalm 95:4-6a

I await each day, and wonder.

August Crystal Clear Air

Have you ever thought about the myriad meanings attributed to the word air?

When I wrote the title above, I had just completed downloading several photographs I took yesterday at an estuary, marsh, beach on the north shore of Massachusetts. And just before downloading those photographs, I had been out in front of my house initially to bring in my recycling bin, which had just been emptied by the waste services, but stayed standing on the curb because the air was so weightless and light bearing (baring too!). In terms of weather, it is a beautiful morning.

yesterday morning, also beautiful, but bearing some weight and motion

Then as I came back in and opened my computer to begin this post, and proceeded to title this post, I was drawn to the thought of air. How many definitions for “air”. It is visual, it is actually, viewable sometimes and not to be seen other times. In fact Collins dictionary notes that it has 27 definitions. I will not list nor discuss them all. But after noting with my passing by neighbor that today is a beautiful day, the air is so clear, I, smiling, came back in and the thought that came to me when I raised my fingers to the keys of this laptop is that in addition air is audible; consider the definition (one of 27!!):

Air is a song-like vocal or instrumental composition. The term can also be applied to the interchangeable melodies of folk songs and ballads.

So air is music. Imagine a beautiful voice raised to praise a beautiful invisible yet not the least bit empty sensation. Sensations stand alone and yet they cannot be without having been noticed. Sensation, according to Collins dictionary, is a noun with five meanings.

Go where you want with these two words aka experiences aka actions aka recipients. (I had another connecting word that was not aka, but these days it is losing the meaning I intend for it, and I didn’t want to jar you with the more frequent associations that word currently brings; yet obviously I have by bringing this sentence into the text.)

Jar! think of that noun and verb. Ugh, I just looked it up. In addition to a created vessel and to a sudden poke (mental, physical, or emotional) it also is a computer file format that serves to aggregate, archive and compress a file and its associated metadata and formats.

Words are remarkably malleable. And think of a word in the myriad languages extant today, and in those that have disappeared. Why do we have so many languages? Why do we separate ourselves from one another? Why do we erect so many walls?

How did I get from the beauty of this day and its clear, musical air to heaving, burdening, disrupting walls? It seems, of late, it takes a conscious effort not to stumble down those descending stairs.

So, I am placing my hands, palms down on the concrete, and pushing me up. I am rising up to the light air that is what I breathe and is singing in my head right now. I am going to tell you that yesterday was such a day of beauty, as is today, and that I saw, count them, 47 types of shore and marsh and raptor birds in one perhaps two mile length of ocean back (these viewings, these soundings, these delights were not even while on an ocean beach, rather they were within the brackish waters that meet and converse with the ocean, river, reeds, muds and sand). Did I personally recognize them all without other voices speaking their names? No! I do not have that knowledge. Did I learn a few more things about these lovely, feathered, visiting and resident avians? Yes. Did I love being there with 14 other people, all of who knew far more than I? Yes. Did we have any moments of disagreement, distress, disregard? No. Yesterday was so lovely that even if I were standing out front this morning and it was 95 degrees farenheit and 95% humidity, I would have thought the air is so clear! It is a beautiful day! Beauty carries with it beauty.

Remarkable how much joy good can carry and convey and place before one.

I, as you who have been here before know, have not the finest “camera”, nor the most artistic “eye”, but here are more couple of photographs from yesterday. They include Greater Yellowlegs and/or Lesser Yellowlegs, Long-billed and/or Short-billed Dowitchers, Least and Semi-Palmated Sandpipers, and Greater and Lesser Egrets. I am not sure if the Yellowlegs I photographed are greater or lesser. I forget. I am not sure if I captured Long or Short-Billed Dowitchers. I believe I caught both Least and Semi-Palmated Sandpipers and Greater and Lesser Egrets. And among them a Herring Gull or two. But you will likely not be able to critique me anyway because the photographs are way too unsharp!!

Greater Yellowlegs(?)
Long- or Short-Billed Dowitchers, Semi-Palmated and/or Least Sandpipers,

Greater and Lesser Egrets, Herring Gulls, and someone else

I delight in the day.

It is Quiet. Somewhere

In fact, it is quiet in my house. And I am glad of it.

Noise is very crowded, and sometimes I am not ready for it, indeed not even, at times, up to it. You?

Solitude–of me behind the camera, of the seat in the place, of the place. This is not today here in Massachusetts, however, based on predictions this past Friday for northern New Hampshire, it could be a place there, now. Except that, while in New Hampshire on Friday, I heard from a lot of people that they were headed north to ski for the weekend. And I won’t even guess the odds of how many more like the people I heard, had the same plan–manymanymany. Probably no silence nor solitude in much of north of Latitude: 42o 56′ 47.29″

It is almost the last of March. I have raked the oak leaves off most of the bulbs and rhisomatic (?) shoots, so to enable them to emerge undistorted — oak leaves sometimes grip an emerging shoot within one or two of the oak leaf’s sinuses, and if I don’t come to the rescue first, the shoot’s leaves grow into full size with a crimp or two or three in their height, so they look more like a drill shaft than a screwdriver shaft, this is assuming they escape the grip of the oak leaf! I have not raked the oak leaves out of the vegetable beds yet, and it’s just as well, because we here remain in the 30s, despite a day in the 50s a week or two ago. Yesterday, Saturday, March 29th we here were at 35oF while in NYC it was 65oF. I report this because it is unusual For those of you not residing in the Northeast of this country, I report this because it is unusual. Usually we are in relative tandem, maybe 5 or 10 degrees colder up here compared to NYC, and usually with bitterer winds. So while New Yorkers were traipsing about in shorts and brunching at sidewalk cafes, we in mid and northern New England had redonned our winter jackets and leggings.

Clouds and, on most days for the next 10 days, cold-coldish air is predicted for this region. So you may find a second blogpost from me within the next 7-10 days. My bicycle is shivering in the shed; my gloves are still lying on the kitchen radiator warming up; the urge for hot chocolate still prevails. And what better accompaniment to hot chocolate than blogposting (other than reading, my truly favorite indoor timespent)?

All this being said, I also report that the robins, chickadees, cardinals, titmice and carolina wrens, especially are singing their spring love songs. The downy woodpeckers, who have been about all winter, now are enduring competition from a red-bellied woodpecker couple. The tenacious nuthatches care not the season, they “ank ank ank” frequently, day after day. The audacious blue jays seem to have given up in this neighborhood, and the mockingbirds are nosing their inimical (read the almost word in the middle of that word, i.e., mimic, my goodness, a particularly talented mimicking mockingbird around here has fooled the neighboring imitatees, as well as my phone’s Merlin birdsong/birdcall identifier app), way in–to the absolute disgust of the robins!

Each morning, the earliest robin song gets a little earlier. Well, I think so, I can’t really hear through the closed windows, but a couple of the mornings in the past several weeks I was up early, early and peeking out the back door caught a robin at an hour that a month ago would have been a silent one. Aha, I am back to the topic of silence. Just like that the circle has closed.

There are times when silence pervades so thoroughly, you cast about, no, thrash about, just to make sound. Noise, sounds–like robins at 5:00 then 4:00 then 3:00 AM– can delight, as readily as they can not.

It is the dilemma of too much.

U.S. Navy F/A-18 approaching the speed of sound. The white halo is formed by condensed water droplets thought to result from a drop in air pressure around the aircraft

So, a drop in air pressure around the aircraft because it escaped the speed of sound, to quiet just before the sound can be. Here is something to think about, getting ahead of sound–sound/air pressure. Bigger air pressure, pushes down, or back, and the space it permits is now smaller, and anything in that smaller space is — what? — is LOUDER. Too much in too small a space. (Bill Y, please check my conceptualization, and let me know how widely I err).

Too much in too small a space…..

I look around me and wonder. I wonder, why?

I wo wo wo wo wonderrrr, why? my little runaway. {some of the lyrics from a Del Shannon song from, oh I don’t know, 1961?} A run run run run runaway. {“””}